Wet Skin is an exercise in secrecy and lurid confession; electronic music inspired by the emotional hangovers of digitally mediated sexual encounters (and non-encounters).
Each song on the debut album from Wet Skin is a vignette of isolation and frustration against the market’s ethos of constant connection and overbearing permission to indulge. Pornography at the limits of capitalism and cybernetics; choosing a date reduced to a casual fusion of shopping and gaming. Songs like “Sex Negative” offer a meta-thematic confrontation with the proto-incel themes of some industrial music. Other tracks such as “I Hate What You Like” are less heady, airing a rageful annoyance at the constant push-pull between enlightened criticism and ‘just letting people like things’.
Musically, “Animal God” maps out a space between the slinking mid-tempo grind of “Concrete Jungle”-era DIVE and the guilt ballads of “Pretty Hate Machine”-era Nine Inch Nails. Drawing on themes from Michael Mann’s 1986 masterpiece “Manhunter,” the speaker in all six original songs tries to face up to the disturbing (and increasingly forgotten) reality that we’re more like the monsters we deplore than we’d usually care to admit. Occupying an underworld of shadowy, whispering ambiguity the track list plays like an unearthed chest of lost disclosures.
Disorientation hangs over every word in “Hide From The Light”, an intimate, depressive, polar bookend to the album’s detached, hedonistic opener “Exposure”. The menacing cover of Red 7′s “Heartbeat” casts the original song’s portrayal of romantic desire in an even more grim light than when it appeared in the end credits of “Manhunter”.
The album is rounded out by eviscerating remixes from Statiqbloom & SARIN.
Digital Album
